Bowers was a product of his times - a virulently white supremacist times. He upbraids the Repubicans for "Intimacies" with black Americans (p. 219). He omits the Colfax, LA, Massacre of 1873. He justifies white supremacist killings and rebellion, claiming that the courts had been "captured by Radicals," (p. 451). He attempts to claim that Sheridan was completely wrong in his estimation that Louisiana had suffered over 2,500 murders since 1865, and at every turn he attempts to justify Confederate resistance to equality as noble.
This book was a best-seller, and it should be read as a document of history, in the same way D. W. Griffith's _Birth_of_a_Nation_ should be seen, in order to demonstrate the distortions of history America was largely willing to accept until more modern historians - Kenneth Stampp, Leon Litwack, Eric Foner, and James McPherson, among others - corrected the distortions with an eye to the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws," as well as to simple human decency.

Highly reliable, universally accepted as authoritative until the advent of Marxist 'thinkers' who spout 'racist' as an inadvertent admission of having lost the argument.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning_School